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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Arrived into work this morning and set about the usual tasks; responding to tweets, checking feeds in Google Reader whilst the kettle boiled. All the important things that start my working day! Then as I returned to my workspace it was brought to my attention that there was a problem being experienced by our customers. All systems go...

Presumably a Microsoft Update had been released for Vista that disrupted how our software package communicates with our servers.

We refer to these instances as trends and from the moment it was identified the office began to resemble a scene from CSI. Analysing information from the calls received, troubleshooting and attempting to replicate whilst trying to identify the source. Where was Horatio Caine today? Even though we were unable to understand what had caused the problem we were able to provide a solution to our customers. The workaround was achieved by editing the hosts file:

In Windows, the default hosts file is often blank or it contains (inactive) comment lines followed by IPv4 or (starting with Windows Vista) IPv6 localhost entries.

On systems with default configurations the full path to this file is %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.

127.0.0.1 localhost::1 localhost

Customers experiencing the problem only had IPv6 localhost entries. Although we have a workaround it would be an advantage to understand what occurred.